Cormac McCarthy

They [pigs] defiled down a gully to the water and bunched and jerked their noses at it and came back.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off.

The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. Wheels began to break up.

They were drunk on tiswin they'd brewed and there had been shooting in the night two nights running and an incessant clamor for whiskey.

A thin man in a leather weskit […].

The boots had pointed toes like buskins and they had parfleche soles and high tops that were rolled down about the knees and tied.

In the afternoon black Jackson caught them up, his mount surbated and all but blown.

When he came around the end of the bar he laid down the pistol and he was carrying a bungstarter in one hand.

He turned to the man who spoke. He wore long moustaches after the fashion of teamsters and he wore a widebrim hat with a low round crown.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small perilous garden. The water that reached the canyon floor was no more than a trickle and they leaned by turns with pursed lips to the stone like devouts at a shrine.

Riding out for wood he watched his shadow and the shadow of the horse and travois cross those palings tree by tree. Boyd rode in the travois holding the axe as if he'd keep guard over the wood they'd gathered […]

The pitchman swept his cane in a slow acceleration over the heads of the crowd and then suddenly pointed the silver cap toward Billy and the shill.

They collected wood and built back the fire and they fetched rocks to make a trivet and there they set the bucket to boil.

The riders overtook them laughing and circled the cart at a full gallop until one of them took down his reata and dropped a loop over the mule’s head and brought it to a halt.

[…] inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands.

The nails in the rim of the wheel went ratcheting over the leather pawl and the wheel slowed and came to a stop and the woman turned to the crowd and smiled.

As if it were a maze where these orphans of his heart had miswandered in their journey in life […]

He rode his horse with the reins tied and he wore a pistol at his belt and a plain flatcrowned hat of a type no longer much seen in that country and he wore tooled boots to his knees and carried a quirt.

At this the man at the left who’d so far not spoke at all rose laughing and gestured for the two boys to follow and they went with him out of the square and into the street leaving the disputants to their rustic parkbench tertulia.

The wolf paced and circled limping on three legs and then crouched by the iron stake where it seemed she’d made her querencia.

In the steeply canted light the laddered shadows of the fences looked like railtracks running up the country and doves were crossing below him toward a watertank on the McNew spread. […] Rusted watertanks in a yard strewn with trashpapers the wind had left.

Arranged about her are artificial flowers that appear in their varied pale and pastel colors to be faded from the sun. As if perhaps replevined from some desert grave.

They asked him if he was a pachuco. He said all the pachucos he knew of lived in El Paso. He told em he didn’t know any Mexican pachucos.

Rusted watertanks in a yard strewn with trashpapers the wind had left.

He wheeled the last barrowload of trash from the kitchen yard out to the trashfire and tipped it and stood back and watched the deep orange fire gasping in the dark chuffs of smoke that rose against the twilight sky. […] Along the limits of the city where the roads died in the desert in sand washes and garbage dumps, out to the white perimeters at midday where smoke from the trashfires burned along the horizon like the signature of vandal hordes come in off the inscrutable wastes beyond.